Last month, I posted a short little write-up about how I created my own tweet archive. It was a quick hack, pulled together one Saturday afternoon, and fairly incomplete, at best. But the archive serves its simple purpose every now and then. I intended to update the archive, add some features, and modify the theme files to better prep them for distribution. But I’m realizing I probably won’t get around to that any time soon.

I’m seeing lots of other folks building out their own archive. And lots of them are using the WordPress solution I wrote about. So in the interest of providing a rough starting point, I’m making the WP theme files for my tweet archive available here (under a CC license) for anyone who wants them as a base. Download tweets.zip (39 KB).

One followup note… Andy Graulund (@graulund) is building a similar tweet archive that is much more robust and more awesome than my original. His is a PHP-based solution (no WordPress required) with embedded media, permalinks back to Twitter, graphs showing tweet activity, and more. I believe he’s planning on releasing his source soon. Keep an eye out for that.

In the past, I’ve wanted to browse or search through my own tweets. Viewing my Twitter profile is one way to do that. But if I want to browse back through history, it’s a chore to go back very far. And forget about searching through my own tweets on Twitter since Twitter Search currently only goes back about a seven days.

I know there are a few apps or scripts that create backups and much more for you. But I wanted a database and simple UI completely within my own control. One that wouldn’t go away if the developer abandoned it. So one Saturday a few weeks ago, in a little over an hour, I had my own, free,browsable, searchable tweet archive. Now I can easily browse back to my very first tweet, or search for those quotes by Paul Rand I tweeted last year. This isn’t anything entirely new. I’m just writing it up what works for me in case it helps fit some pieces together. continued